More Minnesota Follies

One of the curious parts of the Minnesota trial has been the presence of Ben Ginsberg, a Washington Republican lawyer who has been serving on the Coleman team and firing off all manner of zingers at the campaign's press conferences. But his major role here may have been as much about being a spokesman as a counsel.

Only today, he filed his motion for admission pro hac vice -- what a lawyer from out of state does in order to serve in a specific case.

His press conferences have been amazing as it is. Who knows what might happen if he gets up to speak in court.

Meanwhile, there were some fun moments in court today. The Coleman team continued their pattern of showing how flawed absentee ballots have been counted in some counties while other counties threw certain ones out, which they say is a violation of Equal Protection.

The problem is that these are all in deep-red counties. Yesterday we heard from Carver County (Coleman 55%, Franken 29%), Scott county (Coleman 51%, Franken 31%), and today we've heard from Stearns County (Coleman 46%, Franken 34%), and Olmsted County (Coleman 47%, Franken 38%).

This does kind of contradict the campaign's claim that Republican areas haven't been thoroughly counted, but Dems have -- an idea that Norm has mounted to explain why his selected pool of ballots isn't cherry-picked when it comes from GOP areas. Republican counties could be pretty permissive, too.

In addition, Stearns County elections official Randy Schreifels said his county has been finding a few previously uncounted ballots -- one of which had been on the desk of a staffer who was on leave. When pressed by Franken lawyer Kevin Hamilton, he agreed this meant the ballot had been sitting there for months.

Now it may well be that this story is true. As I've said with prior cases of the Coleman camp boasting of new ballots being found in deep-red counties, there is unfortunately always going to be room for human error with 2.9 million ballots. But just imagine what Fox News or the Wall St. Journal would be saying if Dem areas were doing this for Franken.